Musical MIDI Accompaniment

Welcome to the home page and central
clearing house for MMA - Musical MIDI Accompaniment.

“MMA—Musical MIDI Accompaniment” is an accompaniment
generator. It creates MIDI tracks
for a soloist to perform over from a user supplied
file containing chords and MMA directives.

MMA is very versatile and generates excellent tracks. It comes
with an extensive user-extendable library with a variety of
patterns for various popular rhythms, detailed user manuals,
and several demo songs.

MMA is a command line driven program. It creates MIDI files
which are then played by a sequencer or MIDI file play program.

How good is MMA's output? Well, to start you might want to check out some
of my own recordings.
And here is a song created
TOTALLY with MMA.
Give a listen . . . I was impressed and I wrote MMA! My understanding is that Kara took
an existing Yahama .sty file, converted it to MMA library
format, wrote a MMA song file with a few chords, compiled, and that's about
it. Very cool! Finally, here's another song by Kara,
Sunshine Of My Life,
which was done in studio with a MMA background track.

I have completed a complete CD of my saxophone playing with MMA backgrounds.
Give a listen, and buy it, at Cedars.

People all over the
world are using MMA on a daily basis. From Bach Fugues (really!) to
Jazz to Country to Techno to just about anything you can imagine MMA's
templating track system puts you in control of your music.

MMA is written in Python. You'll need version 2.7.0 or greater
of Python for MMA to
work. In addition to the Python 2 series, MMA also works with all versions of Python 3.x.

MMA was started in 2003 and was in BETA for over 3 years and had over 24 releases before
we decided that it was time for the 1.0 version (release 16.06.a
is now available).
We continue to tweak the program to make it better ...
but, right now it is a pretty darned nice piece of software.
Please help the community by advising us of bugs,
creating songs for distribution, and new and improved
library files.

There are lots of other generators like MMA. The most popular are
“Band In A Box” and “Jammer”. The problem with many of these programs
is that they lock you into a proprietary format, work only with limited
computing platforms, or insist on a silly GUI which limits
your choices. You might think that the lack of a GUI is limiting,
but we've found that MMA's method gives you maximum flexibility
in setting volumes, effects, patterns, etc.

MMA is free!
Yes, this means you don't have to pay for it—more importantly
it means that you can use (or even change) MMA in any manner you want. MMA
is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

MMA is developed on a Linux platform, but should
be usable on just about any modern computer system.

If you are confused by
the acronym "MMA" and were looking for the the
MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) please visit
http://www.midi.org.
On the other hand, if you were completely confused
and were looking for the
Mixed Martial Arts folk, try
http://www.mmafighting.com/. We did think about
calling our program by some different names, but they all share
letters with other things. Sorry to others.